Twitter

How to Create an Auto-Retweet and Favorite Bot for Twitter. Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) – Medium. It’s early summer, and I’m in Dupont Circle.

Something’s off. People, I notice, seem to be suddenly tweeting much less lately. But I’ve got a book to finish, so I file the observation away to carefully inspect later. It’s late summer, and I’m standing in Madison Square, frowning.
Here's how Twitter @mentions are changing. Posts on Twitter — tweets — are about to undergo their most significant change in a decade.

Most of the changes, like no longer counting photos and Twitter handles against your character count, are obviously awesome. However, one change has left the Twitter faithful a little confused: @mentions.
Mystery Dot: The Best Kept Secret on Twitter. Good tweeting is an acquired skill—the more you do it, the better you get.

As you spend more time in the 140-character world, you’ll slowly learn your way around and pick up best practices. But there’s one essential lesson that’s buried deep in Twitter’s FAQs, and I tweeted for years before figuring it out. This may seem like a minor technical tip, but it’s one that separates the novices from the pros. So listen up, this is important. The Scoop. Twitter Guide - The Best Twitter Apps and Tools. The complete guide to the best Twitter apps and tools that will help you get the most out of Twitter.

The first tweet was published almost 8 years ago and Twitter has come a long way since then. There’s a whole ecosystem of apps and services available now that allow us to use Twitter in more ways than ever before. This guide curates the best tools that will help you get the most out of Twitter. 1. Nuzzel – This works as an intelligent filter for Twitter and helps you discover the most popular news stories shared across your Twitter network. 2. 3.
How to Use Hashtags: A Complete Guide. 140 Characters Are More Than Enough. Since its founding in 2006, it has been difficult to separate Twitter the platform from the 140-character limit that defines it.

At its inception, blogs were the norm, and the idea of a service that deliberately compressed writing so that it could fit in a single SMS text seemed both absurd and controversial. Which, of course, was intentional. The "140" that counts down with each keystroke has prefaced every criticism of Twitter’s superficiality, every celebration of breakneck pace, and every flash of wit. Today, Twitter is a company struggling to find both growth and a sustainable business model, and is considering its nuclear option: expanding the character limit. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Twitter is internally testing ideas to blow up the tweet, weighing everything from adding 10 more characters to extending the size of tweets considerably.

The change is not without its proponents.
One Image to Rule Them All: Size Specs to Work Across Social Media. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but embedding one in a tweet only costs you 23 of your 140 characters.

So with limited space to work with on social networks, it’s no wonder that many digital marketers have found success using images to accompany their tweets and status updates. Recently, Twitter’s data scientist Douglas Mason concluded that tweets containing photos from verified accounts resulted in a 35 percent increase in the number of retweets. Similar results are seen across the social landscape—photos make a huge difference. However, it’s important to make sure that the images are sized appropriately for social networks.
57 Things I Learned on the Way to 300,000 Twitter Followers. How much is your Twitter profile worth?
Tips & Tricks: Why the Period Before @Mentions?
Have you ever been scrolling through your Twitter feed and seen a couple of tweets starting with a period before an @mention?

Well, this is one of Twitter’s lesser-known quirks, and it silently plays a big role in what comes up in your feed. When you Tweet directly at someone (by putting their @handle as the beginning of your Tweet), that Tweet only comes up in the feeds of users who follow both you and the person you are directly Tweeting at. Why?
The anatomy of the perfect tweet.

Editor's note: This story first appeared on PR Daily in June.

Imagine if you discovered the formula for the perfect tweet—a message so perfect that Twitter users can’t help but follow your account and retweet your post. Well, hold on to your Twitter handles, because the perfect tweet has been discovered, in theory. Last week, researchers at UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs released a nine-page paper on how to predict the social media popularity of a news article before it is published. Astonishingly, the researchers developed a tool that forecasts popularity with an 84 percent accuracy rate. The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dived deeper into the study, exploring how the research can help media outlets craft tweets that will be shared and clicked. But HP Labs isn’t the first organization to try to predict the popularity of a tweet.
The Beginner's Guide to Twitter.

Update: This post was updated November 2013 to reflect current statistics and tools.

Do you have a parent, friend or colleague ready to ditch his or her digital training wheels and head into Twitter's open wilderness? These pointers should get them started.
How to Use Hashtags on Twitter: A Simple Guide for Marketers. Every time we host live webinars (and as this long list suggests, that is quite often), quite a few attendees get confused about what to do with the hashtag we provide.